Distracted Methodologies is a research collaboration between artists Flora Parrott and Moyra Derby. It is motivated by the incompatibilities between the conventions of academic research and the qualities of practice-based research. The proposition of a distracted methodology upends negative framings of distraction as a cognitive flaw, and argues for the creative potential of distracted and dispersed attention, allowing for multi-sensory, tangential and associative ways of thinking. Along the way, we have collaborated and been inspired by other artists and academics. In this website you will find the work of others who are easily distracted and the website has been made in conversation with and designed by Claire Undy.

This website is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 863944 THINK DEEP.

Taking apart distraction points to its potential to bring thoughts and sensations into unanticipated contact. When the prefix dis is attached to a verb it indicates that the action of that verb has been undone. It does not simply imply the lack of the action, but an active undoing of some quality of it. The dis of distraction has work to do.

The ‘course’ of discourse comes from ‘cursus’ which means to run, and the ‘traction’ of distraction coming from ‘trahere’ to drag, pull or draw. To be discursive is to run to and fro between ideas, a process of speculative reasoning, and developing an argument through exchange. The action of running is still there, but its directional impetus has been replaced by a multidimensional sense of movement. So where do we go with the experience of distraction? In taking the word apart, the material contact implicit in traction comes to the fore, scoring a surface or indenting a material, but it is the sense of pulling or drawing in one direction that has been undone.
Distraction is usually thought of negatively, a confused and agitated state of mind that needs to be resolved by the decisiveness of focused attention, and our social, cultural and economic participation more and more seems to depend on our attentional capacities, and the demand to pay attention values relatively narrow bands of attentional experience. Contemporary attentional capacity is often characterised as fractured, shallow, disintegrating, partial, and in deficit. But in discounting distraction what cognitive qualities are being lost?

The associative pulls of distraction are proposed as a form of resistance to the demands for efficiency and compliance in attentional response. The selectivity of focused attention relies on the confidence to decide what is relevant and what can be discarded. In contrast, distraction puts decisions on hold as it brings in new information, allows for collaboration between our senses, and it stays open to multiple points of view. So a distracted methodology asks, what happens if we allow attention to go off track, to meander, to disperse objectives and scatter hierarchies, to stay open to the tug of the peripheral?